Women and Children First!
It's a time-honored code in many emergency situations that women and children should be saved first. However, there is no maritime law that states women and children should be evacuated first when a ship is being abandoned.
On Titanic, the words "Women and children first" was never said by Captain Smith.
It came about when Second Officer Charles Lightoller saw that there were many passengers still on board the ship. Ship Designer Thomas Andrews had just reported to Captain Smith that all of five of the ship's watertight compartments had been breached (taking on water), and that the ship would sink in less than two hours. Captain Smith had no reaction but it was clear to Second Officer Lightoller that they needed to abandon the ship.
Lightoller said in his autobiography that Captain Smith was not giving orders or instructing the crew. When he saw that the Captain wasn't able to make a decision, Lightoller asked him: "Hadn't we better get the women and children into the boats, sir?"
After a minute, the Captain said quietly: "put the women and children in and lower away."
Lightoller took it as an order but the Captain never said "women and children FIRST."
The words were interpreted differently by both First Officer William Murdoch and Second Officer Charles Lightoller. When Lightoller told Murdoch what the Captain said, he took it to mean "women and children FIRST." Lightoller took it to mean "women and children ONLY."
At Second Officer Lightoller's station on the Port side with the even numbered lifeboats, many were lowered with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board. Lightoller purposely did not fill the seats with men; they turned men away. The crew and other officers at his Lifeboat station strongly enforced Lightoller's order of "women and children ONLY." They prevented men from boarding the lifeboats to the point of getting into brawls.
At First Officer Murdoch's station on the Starboard side with the odd numbered lifeboats, he allowed some single men and married couples to fill empty seats if the women with children who had been waiting were already in the boat.
As a result, 74% of women and 52% of children were saved. Only 20% of the men were saved.
There were some prominent men who survived by forcing themselves to surpass the lines and jump in the lifeboats, like J. Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line. He was branded a coward, lost his wife and family, and spent the rest of his life trying to avoid publicity.
Most of the crew and passengers who were interviewed on Carpathia and when they arrived in New York said that Captain Smith's actions from the time Titanic hit the iceberg up to the evacuation process did not appear to be very assertive. In fact, they said they rarely saw him. For a man who had been at sea for over 40 years, with 27 years as a sea captain, some passengers said he was passive and never instructed passengers what to do. He made no decisions. There were others who said he was fully in control and used a megaphone to get passengers to proceed in an orderly fashion to the lifeboats. For the most part, passengers felt he was ineffective and blamed him for such a huge loss of lives.
Some First Class passengers said it appeared that Captain Smith was not in control at all.
Abandon Ship!
Even though Captain Smith ordered passengers and crew to proceed to the lifeboats, he failed to adequately organize and communicate to let the crew know that the Carpathia was not waiting in the distance to accept lifeboats or that it was on the way to them.
He also never gave an order to abandon the ship.
He never told the Bridge officers that the ship was going to sink. In fact, there were many crew members who kept working to keep Titanic operational. Firemen and trimmers kept the engines fueled with coal until they were told they were relieved of their duties. However, the band was never relieved of their duties and played until the last minute. Eyewitnesses said they slid off the deck into the water when the ship went under the surface.
Had they known the ship was going to sink, logic says the firemen would have stopped feeding the fires, and the stewards would have stopped their duties in the cabins and dining areas. More of the crew would have saved themselves and made their way to a lifeboat.
An example of lack of communication: It wasn't until some time after the collision that the Bridge officers noticed the ship was slowly sinking. The Captain had never communicated what he knew from the Ship's Designer Thomas Andrews.
Quartermaster George Rowe later said that he was so unaware of Titanic's emergency situation that he phoned the Bridge to ask why he had just seen a lifeboat pass by his watch station.
Captain Smith also did not inform his officers that the ship did not have enough lifeboats to save everyone. Had he done that, perhaps the officers and crew would have loaded the lifeboats to full capacity.
Had he been more communicative or if he had checked up on the lifeboat stations of the First and Second Officers to notice that they were not filling the lifeboats, would it have made much of a difference? The ship would still have sunk, but would there have been a greater number of survivors?
It's all Monday morning quarterbacking now, but the Titanic event was so devastating that one can't help but try to see where things went wrong.
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